1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic mail (hereinafter referred to as “e-mail”) transmitting apparatus, an e-mail transmitting method and a recording medium in which a program to make a computer execute processing for transmitting an e-mail with attached data such as document data to a recipient is recorded.
2. Description of Related Art
The following description sets forth the inventor's knowledge of related art and problems therein and should not be construed as an admission of knowledge in the prior art.
In recent years, along with the popularization of the Internet, there increases a chance of sending electronic data as an attachment of an e-mail using a personal computer (hereinafter referred to as “PC”) or an Internet facsimile apparatus (hereinafter referred to as “IFAX”) from a home or an office.
Even if the contents of the data are the same, in some cases the data can be sent in a format that allows a user to change the contents, but in another cases the data must be sent in a format that does not allow a user to change the contents. For example, in cases where the data is sent from an organization within the same organization to ask a check of the document data, if the data is sent in a format that allows a user to change the contents by using a document application software, the recipient can easily change the contents of the received data.
However, in cases where the data is sent to an organization other than an organization to which the sender belongs, in some cases it is preferable to send the data after converting it into a format such as a TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) format that is difficult to change the contents by a user.
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 5-153159 discloses an e-mail sending system. According to this technique, the format information that recipients can receive is stored as a data base in advance. At the time of transmitting the data, a sender obtains the format information corresponding to the recipient from the data base, and if the format of the data transmitted from the sender is different from the aforementioned obtained format, the format is automatically converted.
Another technique is disclosed by Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 6-350788. According to this technique, in cases where the format information that the recipient can receive is not stored, the format capable of being received by the recipient is obtained by communicating with the recipient, and the format is converted into the obtained format.
According to the aforementioned conventional technique, it is possible to convert the format of the data attached to an e-mail into a format that can be received by a recipient. However, it was not possible to determine whether the data can be transmitted as an attachment of the e-mail in a format created by the sender. In other words, it was not possible to determine the format of the data to be attached to the e-mail by judging the recipient's property such as whether the recipient belongs to the same organization as that of the sender.
Accordingly, in cases where a recipient is not allowed to change or edit the contents of the data, the sender has to convert the data format, causing a troublesome operation.
The description herein of advantages and disadvantages of various features, embodiments, methods, and apparatus disclosed in other publications is in no way intended to limit the present invention. Indeed, certain features of the invention may be capable of overcoming certain disadvantages, while still retaining some or all of the features, embodiments, methods, and apparatus disclosed therein.